
Image Search Client
Image Search Client
Bing Image Search runs image search over Bing's web-wide image index — by keyword, similar image, aspect ratio, or size filter.
Coverage broader than any single stock library
Sunsets 2025-08-11
Obtain a key from Azure. GET /v7.0/images/search?q=...&license=Public for keyword search; POST same endpoint with multipart body for image-similarity search.
Uptime · 30-day window
About this API
Image Search is the image counterpart of Bing Search, indexing publicly accessible images across the open web (not stock-library-only, but includes Pexels/Unsplash indexes). Differentiated by two capabilities: commercial-use license filter (search only commercially usable images), and reverse image-similarity search (POST an image to find similar ones — quality is solid). Sunsets 2025-08-11 with the Bing Search family. Alternatives: Google Custom Search Image API (still available), Pexels/Unsplash official APIs (stock-only but copyright-clear), or self-hosted CLIP-based image search.
What you can build
- 1Find blog illustrations (filter by license)
- 2Reverse image search by image
- 3Visual asset discovery
- 4Visual data augmentation for NLP tasks
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- Coverage broader than any single stock library
- Filter by commercial-use license
- Precise filters by aspect ratio, size, dominant color
Limitations
- Sunsets 2025-08-11
- Does not return per-image copyright details — only license type
Example request
curl https://microsoft.com/<endpoint>Getting started
Obtain a key from Azure. GET /v7.0/images/search?q=...&license=Public for keyword search; POST same endpoint with multipart body for image-similarity search.
FAQ
How reliable is the commercial-license filter?+
Based on source site declarations. Bing detects best-effort, but final copyright confirmation is your responsibility.
Can I download the actual image?+
API returns contentUrl (original URL); downloading is on you. Respect the source site's robots and copyright.
Technical details
- Auth type
- unknown
- Pricing
- unknown
- Protocols
- REST
- SDKs
- python, javascript, csharp, java, go
- Response time
- 93 ms
- Last health check
- 5/12/2026, 7:37:52 AM
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